any automotive manufacturers tout that their sports-car development programs begin on the racetrack. In fact, enthusiast publications, including this one, often take road-going sports cars to the track to better judge their performance credentials.
If track-focused cars are the ultimate realization of an automaker's capabilities, why not just put them on the road as is? Most would agree that there are many reasons this would be impractical: Ride comfort and day-to-day driveability, issues so critical to a road car, would never be addressed if a car were evaluated solely on its fastest lap time. Hence, automakers inevitably have to make compromises.
For the most hard-core enthusiasts willing to forgo a little civility, manufacturers are turning back the compromise dial and offering barely street-legal racers — in addition to a more road-friendly version of the same model.
So how close can a road-going sports car get in performance to a track-oriented machine born of its own DNA? With this in mind, we considered five pairs of cars to find out for ourselves: the Dodge Viper SRT10 and SRT10 ACR, the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder and Superleggera, the Porsche 911 Carrera S and GT3 RS, the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 and ZR1, and the Ferrari F430 and 430 Scuderia.
These are all twins forged from the same basic core but with distinct purposes in mind. One is built for the street. The other is intended for the track. Unfortunately, the Corvettes and the Ferraris were not available for our test at press time, so we will give you our best assessment of the similarities and differences of these pairs from previous exposure to them.
We drove the Vipers, the Gallardos and the Porsches on the road to test their street capabilities. We then asked IMSA GTS champion and R&T contributor Steve Millen to wring them out on Willow Springs International Raceway's high-speed road course. At the end of the day, we sought to answer three questions about each higher-performing variant: What do you gain, what do you lose, and is it worth the money?
